My import copy of this arrived yesterday, and I pretty much spent all evening playing it.

It reminds me of Master of Orion (the original one) in a very good way.  Obviously, not in the topic or the structure of gameplay, but the way it is streamlined down to the things I care about, and how you can finish a game start-to-finish in 4-5 hrs (or less).   Having a stack of 2 armies (so about 6 units total) is a major force in the game.   A fairly well developed building (though maybe not your capital) will have like 4 buildings in it total by the end of the game.  There is virtually no micromanagement, though I suspect I may discover more as I learn more about the strategies of the game.  Your civ-specific bonuses are not little things like +5% attack, they are bigger things like auto-healing units or all cities start with bonus population.

It’s a shame this isn’t coming out for the PC, since I think it’s just a good Civ experience.  It is kind of divergent from Civ 4 though… whereas Civ 4 feels like a “history simulator” (albeit a light one compared to EU3 or whatnot), Civ Rev feels like a boardgame.  There are a few things I miss from the bigger Civ games, but on the whole it is a pretty worthwhile trade.  They just go out of their way to make some things a lot less painful – there’s no war exhaustion, no unhappiness, no corruption, and almost no population management.  Yet it retains all that core “Civ” vibe and identity and general gameplay flow.  I’m quite impressed. 

It takes a bit of unlearning from normal Civ strategies, actually.  At first I was worried about expanding too fast, or staying at war too long, and those are really just non-issues in the game.

As a totally unexpected bonus, all my time spent playing was with Xavier sitting next to me on the couch, totally absorbed.  He loved watching the armies fight and the cities grow.  He particularly wanted to make sure I fought all the barbarians in the world.   It probably didn’t help my strategies to have a 7 yr old advocating war against anyone we met, but it sure was fun.  It’s the first time I’ve seen him get engaged in a strategy game, which I think is awesome.  By the end of the evening he was making suggestions about whether or not we needed more armies and which cities to conquer, which was just plain fun for me as a Dad.  His favorite feature, bar none, is the goofy animated advisors which shove each other out of the way as you flick between menus.  Not what I might have guessed, but it clearly worked out...

So yeah, thumbs up overall.  I think it’s out here through regular channels in a couple of weeks.